Amazon's 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' is a haunting portrait of womanhood

For a long time, reboots were the plague of an entertainment industry that refused to let original ideas and perspectives flourish. But Amazon's reimagining of Peter Weir's seminal 1979 film Picnic at Hanging Rock flies in the face of this presumption, reading instead like a reclaiming of the iconic touchstone that explores girlhood through women's perspectives.

The six-part miniseries, while deferential to Weir, is more of a return to the original source material: The famous novel by Joan Lindsay set in 1900 Australia follows the unexplained disappearances of three ladies from a finishing school. Starring Game of Thrones' Natalie Dormer as the impenetrable headmistress of Appleyard College, it subsumes viewers in not only the surreal mystery of its story, but also the unreality of women's lives during the Victorian era (and now).

Everything about Picnic at Hanging Rock mesmerizes the eye and mind, compelling you to keep watching. The sets, costumes, performances, and direction radiate a dazzling brilliance, but its resonance goes far beyond just visual splendor. The series captivates on a cerebral level, too, asking eternally unanswerable questions about identity, womanhood, freedom, trauma, and society.

Like the three central characters at the heart of the mystery (portrayed by the magnetic actresses Lily Sullivan, Samara Weaving, and Madeleine Madden), it evades any attempt to pin it down. Just when you think you've grasped what it's saying or doing, the series skirts away from view, refusing to be reduced to a single definition or viewpoint.

In less capable hands, this could have resulted in an vague and empty mess. But instead, the elusiveness of Picnic at Hanging Rock acts as a mirror of the central subject matter. It speaks to women's unknowability in an oppressive society, the cultural pressures that do not allow us to know each other or even ourselves. The topic remains as poignantly relevant to women in the #MeToo era as it was for women in the early 19th century, or in the '60s and '70s when both the book and film were released.

You cannot place exactly what it is, but something rotten lies beneath the pretty frills and delicate flowers of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The boarding school girls visit the Hanging Rock on Valentine's Day, using the landmark as a lovely backdrop for a picnic, while ignoring its significance in Australia's own bloody history with colonization and indigenous genocide.

All dressed in white, the ghosts of the missing girls haunt in more ways than one. Their absence unleashes the collective unconscious of those around them, bringing all that was repressed to the surface.

The femininity embedded into the show brings the work of Virginia Woolf to mind, who was radical for her time because she wrote novels centered on women's inner lives. She was a writer consumed by the desire to capture women's interiority: who they are outside the male gaze, the complexity and secrecy of the relationships they could only share with one another.

As Woolf famously said in A Room of One's Own, women in fiction have served as "looking glasses," reflecting men's own fears and desires back at them. The most revolutionary thing a woman can be, then, is herself rather than the idea of a woman created by the male psyche.

Picnic at Hanging Rock offers no conclusive answers to how one breaks free of these shackles, relying instead on your interpretation for meaning. This is not because it lacks concrete substance, but because it acts as a respite from what women continue to struggle against to this today. It asks you to release yourself from the corset of social pressures. Women are too often restricted to being only one thing, but here they are allowed to be people, in all their complicated contradictions.

Basking in the unadulterated female subjectivity of Picnic at Hanging Rock is a rare treat. Even rarer still, it's a femininity presented through the prism of women writers, directors, and cast members. Unsurprisingly, it recalls the stylistic and thematic oeuvre of Sofia Coppola, who points to Weir's film as a central inspiration for her work. Like 2017's The Beguiled, 2006's Marie Antoinette, or 1999's Virgin Suicides, though, certain viewers will want to disregard this series as pretty to look at but ultimately vacuous.

It's a criticism often lodged at women creators who's work is predominantly interested in women's worlds, like Jane Austen's contemporaries being quick to overlook the depth of her novels.

But if there is one definitive takeaway from Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is that society can disregard the power of women at its own peril.

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